The inventive concept relates generally to nonvolatile memory devices and, more particularly, to partial page programming of nonvolatile memory devices.
Data is programmed to a nonvolatile memory device by changing threshold voltages of its memory cells, and data is read from a nonvolatile memory device by identifying correspondences between threshold voltages of memory cells and threshold voltage distributions representing different data states.
In a nonvolatile memory device where data is programmed on a page-by-page basis, even if data corresponding to a sub-portion of one page (referred to as “partial page data”) is required to be programmed, data corresponding to the entire page (referred to as “full page data”) is transferred or input from a memory controller to the nonvolatile memory device. As the storage capacity of the nonvolatile memory device increases, the page size of the nonvolatile memory device tends to increase accordingly. Thus, the data transfer (or input) time and program time for the full page data may increase.